Saturday, December 19, 2015

from ignorant aggression to aggressive ignorance

The latest
political joke is that 30 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of Democrats in
a recent survey by Public Policy Polling agreed that they would like to see Agrabahbombed. Agrabah, it turns out, is the
capital city in Disney’s Aladdin. Nicely done, PPP – what better way to show
how blind is the American imperial use of power, and how easily accepted. Dems
are making mock of Republicans, but I’m sure that if the question had asked if they
supported Obama droning Jafar of Agrabah, there would have been close to thirty
percent, maybe more. Jafar was Aladdin’s nemesis in the movie.

There is the politics of ignorant aggression, and then
there is the politics of aggressive ignorance. The latter is being pursued by
the Governor and Legislator of Florida. Having staked out positions that
climate change is a fraud, the governing principles of Florida are having a
hard time coping with the fact that the sea level is indeed rising and South
Florida has every chance of being the 21st century Atlantis, as
Elizabeth Kolbert reports in the current New Yorker. Florida, unlikely
Louisiana, can’t really turn to the traditional levee and dike system, because
under the swamps and cities and beaches of Southern Florida, there is
limestone. Limestone is porous. You can put a levee on top of it, but the water
will just flow under the levee, through the limestone. Kolbert reports that
Miami Beach is becoming more and more like Venice, Italy, save for the fact
that the inhabitants have cars, and wait for the periodic flood waters to abate
to get around.

As for what the press laughingly calls the “adults”, the
political elite in Florida”

“Marco Rubio, Florida’s junior
senator, who has been running third in Republican primary polls, grew up not
far from Shorecrest, in West Miami, which sounds like it’s a neighborhood but
is actually its own city. For several years, he served in Florida’s House of
Representatives, and his district included Miami’s flood-vulnerable airport.
Appearing this past spring on “Face the Nation,” Rubio was asked to explain a
statement he had made about climate change. He offered the following: “What I
said is, humans are not responsible for climate change in the way some of these
people out there are trying to make us believe, for the following reason: I
believe that climate is changing because there’s never been a moment where the
climate is not changing.”

Around the same time, it was revealed that aides to Florida’s
governor, Rick Scott, also a Republican, had instructed state workers not to
discuss climate change, or even to use the term. The Scott administration,
according to the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, also tried to ban
talk of sea-level rise; state employees were supposed to speak, instead, of
“nuisance flooding.” Scott denied having imposed any such Orwellian
restrictions, but I met several people who told me they’d bumped up against
them. One was Hammer [Kolbert’s interviewee, an environmental-studies
researcher who works for the Union of Concerned Scientists]who, a few years
ago, worked on a report to the state about threats to Florida’s transportation
system. She said that she was instructed to remove all climate-change
references from it. “In some places, it was impossible,” she recalled. “Like
when we talked about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has
‘climate change’ in the title.”

We are in the hands of the kind of bozos who used to populate the
cartoon The Far Side. It isn’t pretty.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.